I am going to vote for John Corzine for governor of NJ on Tuesday November 3 for many reasons, but the most important is that he is not a Republican, and that a vote for him is the only vote that will prevent the election of the Republican candidate.
There was a time when I might have voted for a Republican. There was a time when there were some decent Republicans around, like Senator Case of New Jersey, or Senator Javits of New York, or Senator Morse of Oregon. But the big tent Republican Party is no more. They have systematically purged all who do not fit the ideological bent of the party.
To be sure the Republican Party had its genesis in the election of Lincoln and the abolition of slavery, but by 1877 less than a dozen years after the martyrdom of Lincoln, Republican Rutherford B. Hayes sold out the newly freed slaves in order to gain the Presidency. The website Travel and History put it this way: “To the four million former slaves in the South, the Compromise of 1877 was the ‘Great Betrayal.’ Republican efforts to assure civil rights for the blacks were totally abandoned. The white population of the country was anxious to get on with making money. No serious move to restore the rights of black citizens would surface again until the 1950s.”
Thereafter, Republicans and their big business allies dominated the political landscape with such “luminaries” as Chester A. Arthur, Benjamin Harrison, William McKinley, William Howard Taft, Warren G. Harding, Calvin Coolidge, and Herbert Hoover representing a dominant Republican Party. Lincoln must have been revolving in his grave. This sorry lot were were interrupted only by the ascendancy of Teddy Roosevelt, who became the only distinguished Republican during this whole era leading up to the Great Depression, and he was never the choice of the Republican establishment. After being elected governor of New York, he was kicked up to the Vice-Presidency to get him out of the way, and much to the dismay of the Republican establishment became President upon the death of McKinley. The Great Depression was not the sole fault of Herbert Hoover. It became inevitable through the policies of three Republican Presidents from 1921 to 1929, eight years, which in many ways resembled the eight years of the Bush Administration. Fortunately for the US and indeed the world, Bush who was only the head of the monster, realized in the last year of his Administration that we were facing a potential repeat of 1929 and took drastic steps to avert disaster, which true to form were opposed by the majority of his party. Also happily, while it took four years between the onset of the Depression in 1929 and the inaugural of FDR, it took only one year between the beginning of the recession of 2008 and the inauguration of Barack Obama in 2009.
To be sure the Democratic Party for most of the years after the Civil War was identified as the party of racism and the Republican party continued to bask in the image of Lincoln, but this was the result of the Democratic Party being a House divided against itself, with the part from the old South hanging on to the vestiges of slavery, and the Northern part becoming increasingly the party of emancipation and Civil Rights. Such Democratic Senators as Bilbo and Eastland of Mississippi, and Richard Russell of Georgia along with Strom Thurmond of South Carolina were determined to hold onto the quasi slavery that continued in the Unreconstructed South while northern Democrats like Lehman of New York and Humphrey of Minnesota worked for reform. Thurmond even ran for President in 1948 on the Dixiecrat Party. But the Nixon Administration’s Southern strategy changed that and invited such segregationists into the Republican fold. Thurmond became a Republican in 1964, and as late as 2002 the Republican about to become majority leader of the Senate, Trent Lott, hailed Thurmond with these remarks, “I want to say this about my state. When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him. We're proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn't have had all these problems over all these years either." See The Nation for more background on Lott.
The Republican Party gave us McCarthyism in the 1950’s and torture in this century and even the relatively benign Eisenhower ordered the CIA to overthrow the democratically elected President of Iran, Mohammed Mosedegh, and installed the hated Shah, which was directly responsible for the ascendancy of the present theocracy in that poor country.
But what of New Jersey? The Star Ledger endorsed the 3rd party candidate, Chris Daggett, but the latest poll shows Daggatt garnering 9% of the vote, so a vote for Daggett is a wasted vote. The Republican candidate, Chris Christie, stands for all the Bromides of the National Republican party. He would be a disaster for the state and his election would be interpreted as a repudiation of Obama. His main attack on Corzine is that NJ has the highest property taxes in the nation, but he forgets to tell us that neither the governor nor the State legislature has any control over property taxes, which are levied by the many towns and villages that dot New Jersey, and that New Jersey had the highest property taxes long before Corzine became governor. He tells us about the high unemployment rate of New Jersey, but he forgets to tell us that it is no higher than the National average and is the product of the Republican induced recession. He also forgets to tell us that New Jersey has the 2nd highest personal income per capita in the nation. As for the income tax, which is under State jurisdiction, New Jersey is 23rd in tax revenue as a % of personal income.
There are only two ways to reduce property taxes. One, with which I fully agree, was suggested by the NJ Chamber of Commerce in a Letter to the Editor in August of 2006. They wrote, “Property tax reform will only happen when there is consolidation of some of the more than 1,000 layers of government that currently have taxing authority” but only Governor Corzine of the three candidates has made any proposal that would further this objective. He has suggested that money should be put into a fund to incentivize municipal and school consolidations. This is the only sound idea on the table.
The other is to raise the income tax and finance our schools with those taxes. Since the main purpose for local property taxes is to fund local schools, changing the funding formula so that schools are funded by state taxes would lower property taxes and remove a major inequity in school funding.
But the biggest problem that New Jersey faces is its huge deficit, which is the direct result of the popular but shortsighted Republican penchant for tax cuts. When Republican Christie Whitman became governor in 1994, she cut the income tax by 1/3 but never found the savings that would offset this loss of revenue. The result, NJ is saddled with huge debt, the interest that goes with it, and no end in sight. Christie promises more of the same, but like all Republicans will not say what programs he will cut, or how he will finance the debt. If Christie is elected NJ will not long continue to be second in per capita income.
Tuesday, October 20, 2009
Tuesday, October 13, 2009
Continuing the Health Care debate
In my last commentary I took time off from the Health Care Debate to focus on the power of money in politics, and my concern with an impending Supreme Court decision, which would allow corporate and union money to dominate our political discourse. My article can be found on the web under the title: "Money and Politics". Before that I addressed Republican Talking Points on Health Care focusing primarily on McCain’s purported proposal.
Now I want to return to the Health Care debate where there continues to be a great deal of deliberate misinformation (lies) and also a great deal of just plain misunderstandings. Some of these can be found in the fears engendered in my own generation who have the best overall health insurance of any segment of the American population and it is a “Government plan” – in fact it is a single payer plan. But it was vigorously opposed by the same groups who now oppose reform for the rest of Americans and who now try to convince us that reform will either undermine Medicare or that somehow Medicare is in fact bad. Thus when we look at the Letters to the Editor column in the NY Times of October 6, we find, e.g. this, “Medicare, is riddled with fraud and waste, has trillions in unfunded liabilities and is not accepted by many of the best doctors.” I think this would be news to most Americans and particularly those over 65. Let me take that reverse order.
1.) Without doubt some doctors don’t take Medicare, though in my personal experience I have not encountered one. On the other hand most doctors don’t take one or more of the private insurance companies and I constantly see signs in doctors offices to the effect that they no longer take United Health Care or Aetna or some other private insurance carrier.
2.) “It has trillions in unfunded liabilities”. That is simply not true. Medicare is now having some relatively small short falls and the same people who oppose reform of the whole system, oppose taking the steps that will make Medicare viable for the foreseeable future. The Bush Administration imposed an unsustainable burden on the Medicare fund when it instituted Medicare Advantage.
Here is what one of my Libertarian physician friends, one Gerry Wachs had to say about it:
I frankly question the $9,000 as an exaggeration, but whatever it is, this windfall for insurance companies cannot be sustained, but it is trumpeted as an attack on Medicare. In fact the reform plan, while cutting back on payments to insurance companies, increases payments to doctors to make sure they stay in Medicare
3.) “Riddled with fraud and waste.” It is well established that the costs of administering Medicare are way below those for private insurance, and while there surely is fraud and waste, that is unfortunately true in every plan, more so in private insurance than in Medicare.
Another letter to the Times from an ophthalmologist that Medicare doesn’t reimburse him for a cheap off label drug so he uses a more expensive one, which costs the government millions. He doesn’t say what items the private insurance companies refuse to reimburse, and examples of insurance companies refusing life saving cancer treatments are legion. He doesn’t even tell us whether private insurance companies reimburse for the drug, which Medicare has removed from its formulary, nor does he tell us what, “off label” means. An “off label” use of a drug means that the drug is being used for a purpose, which has not been proven to be efficacious and has not been approved by the FDA. Physicians use such off label drugs on the basis of their own anecdotal experiences or sometimes obscure articles in Medical Journals.
Finally, I come back to that favorite hobbyhorse of Republicans, Malpractice claims. In previous articles I have pointed out that none of the reforms that have been proposed or have been enacted in the states do anything to prevent or discourage frivolous claims. In fact we have protection against such claims at the present. If the facts proven at trial don’t support it judges can throw the case out and not let it go to the jury. If the judge finds the case to be frivolous he can penalize both the claimant and the attorneys. If that is not enough we could set up special courts, so malpractice cases would be tried before a panel of experts, but that is not what is being proposed. Reform in the states has meant, and means to its advocates in the Congress, limiting awards to “economic damages”, plus a maximum of $250,000 for pain and suffering, which as I have pointed out in the past, means that those who earn large incomes get millions, while a bank clerk who has lost his eyesight only gets that small amount which his/her earning capacity justifies, plus what is left otf the $250,000 after fees and expenses. This is not justice except to those who believe that only the rich have rights, and those who have less are the flotsam of our society to be discarded and disregarded.
The NY Times had an interesting article on the subject on August 31 entitled, “Would Tort Reform Lower Costs?” which is definitely worth reading. It quotes a law professor at the Pennsylvania School of Law as describing tort reform as “a red Herring” and points out that, “As the cost of health care goes up, the medical liability component of it has stayed fairly constant. That means it’s part of the medical price inflation system, but it’s not driving it. The number of claims is small relative to actual cases of medical malpractice.” He adds, “Medical malpractice tort costs were $30.4 billion in 2007, the last year for which data are available. We have a more than a $2 trillion health care system. That puts litigation costs and malpractice insurance at 1 to 1.5 percent of total medical costs. He adds: “We have approximately the same number of claims today as in the late 1980s. Think about that. The cost of health care has doubled since then. The number of medical encounters between doctors and patients has gone up — and research shows a more or less constant rate of errors per hospitalizations. That means we have a declining rate of lawsuits relative to numbers of injuries.” He adds: “…studies looked at the rate of claims and found that only 4 to 7 percent of those injured brought a case. That’s a small percentage. And because the actual number of injuries has gone up since those studies were done — while claims have remained steady — the rate of claims is actually going down.”
What we need is less medical malpractice – not a cap on the ability to be compensated for the harm done.
Now I want to return to the Health Care debate where there continues to be a great deal of deliberate misinformation (lies) and also a great deal of just plain misunderstandings. Some of these can be found in the fears engendered in my own generation who have the best overall health insurance of any segment of the American population and it is a “Government plan” – in fact it is a single payer plan. But it was vigorously opposed by the same groups who now oppose reform for the rest of Americans and who now try to convince us that reform will either undermine Medicare or that somehow Medicare is in fact bad. Thus when we look at the Letters to the Editor column in the NY Times of October 6, we find, e.g. this, “Medicare, is riddled with fraud and waste, has trillions in unfunded liabilities and is not accepted by many of the best doctors.” I think this would be news to most Americans and particularly those over 65. Let me take that reverse order.
1.) Without doubt some doctors don’t take Medicare, though in my personal experience I have not encountered one. On the other hand most doctors don’t take one or more of the private insurance companies and I constantly see signs in doctors offices to the effect that they no longer take United Health Care or Aetna or some other private insurance carrier.
2.) “It has trillions in unfunded liabilities”. That is simply not true. Medicare is now having some relatively small short falls and the same people who oppose reform of the whole system, oppose taking the steps that will make Medicare viable for the foreseeable future. The Bush Administration imposed an unsustainable burden on the Medicare fund when it instituted Medicare Advantage.
Here is what one of my Libertarian physician friends, one Gerry Wachs had to say about it:
“The government pays the companies a fortune to offer them to Medicare beneficiaries. I pay $0 (that is free) each month and get doctor co-pays, $2500+ in free medications, twice a year free dental cleaning, a health club membership… free glasses, free hearing aid etc, etc. That replaces all the ancillary plans out there for backup coverage. The government was paying my plan administrator, Oxford, $9,000/year to cover me so of course they could offer all these benefits.”
I frankly question the $9,000 as an exaggeration, but whatever it is, this windfall for insurance companies cannot be sustained, but it is trumpeted as an attack on Medicare. In fact the reform plan, while cutting back on payments to insurance companies, increases payments to doctors to make sure they stay in Medicare
3.) “Riddled with fraud and waste.” It is well established that the costs of administering Medicare are way below those for private insurance, and while there surely is fraud and waste, that is unfortunately true in every plan, more so in private insurance than in Medicare.
Another letter to the Times from an ophthalmologist that Medicare doesn’t reimburse him for a cheap off label drug so he uses a more expensive one, which costs the government millions. He doesn’t say what items the private insurance companies refuse to reimburse, and examples of insurance companies refusing life saving cancer treatments are legion. He doesn’t even tell us whether private insurance companies reimburse for the drug, which Medicare has removed from its formulary, nor does he tell us what, “off label” means. An “off label” use of a drug means that the drug is being used for a purpose, which has not been proven to be efficacious and has not been approved by the FDA. Physicians use such off label drugs on the basis of their own anecdotal experiences or sometimes obscure articles in Medical Journals.
Finally, I come back to that favorite hobbyhorse of Republicans, Malpractice claims. In previous articles I have pointed out that none of the reforms that have been proposed or have been enacted in the states do anything to prevent or discourage frivolous claims. In fact we have protection against such claims at the present. If the facts proven at trial don’t support it judges can throw the case out and not let it go to the jury. If the judge finds the case to be frivolous he can penalize both the claimant and the attorneys. If that is not enough we could set up special courts, so malpractice cases would be tried before a panel of experts, but that is not what is being proposed. Reform in the states has meant, and means to its advocates in the Congress, limiting awards to “economic damages”, plus a maximum of $250,000 for pain and suffering, which as I have pointed out in the past, means that those who earn large incomes get millions, while a bank clerk who has lost his eyesight only gets that small amount which his/her earning capacity justifies, plus what is left otf the $250,000 after fees and expenses. This is not justice except to those who believe that only the rich have rights, and those who have less are the flotsam of our society to be discarded and disregarded.
The NY Times had an interesting article on the subject on August 31 entitled, “Would Tort Reform Lower Costs?” which is definitely worth reading. It quotes a law professor at the Pennsylvania School of Law as describing tort reform as “a red Herring” and points out that, “As the cost of health care goes up, the medical liability component of it has stayed fairly constant. That means it’s part of the medical price inflation system, but it’s not driving it. The number of claims is small relative to actual cases of medical malpractice.” He adds, “Medical malpractice tort costs were $30.4 billion in 2007, the last year for which data are available. We have a more than a $2 trillion health care system. That puts litigation costs and malpractice insurance at 1 to 1.5 percent of total medical costs. He adds: “We have approximately the same number of claims today as in the late 1980s. Think about that. The cost of health care has doubled since then. The number of medical encounters between doctors and patients has gone up — and research shows a more or less constant rate of errors per hospitalizations. That means we have a declining rate of lawsuits relative to numbers of injuries.” He adds: “…studies looked at the rate of claims and found that only 4 to 7 percent of those injured brought a case. That’s a small percentage. And because the actual number of injuries has gone up since those studies were done — while claims have remained steady — the rate of claims is actually going down.”
What we need is less medical malpractice – not a cap on the ability to be compensated for the harm done.
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